One can never be too thankful that he had John Hay, then a youth in his early twenties--and such a youth! The joy and fun and understanding between them as it crops out in Hay’s letters is a streak of pure sunshine across the almost soddenly tragic life of the White House in the Civil War. This capacity for companionship which so linked men of all types to Lincoln in his lifetime and so held them to him in death is one clue to his final success in bringing out of the struggle over slavery in this country certain solid and definite results--results that have enlarged the boundaries of human freedom and given a convincing demonstration of the need and the preciousness of more and more unionism if we are to secure our final better world. He could not have done what he did had he been less understanding of men and their limitations as well as of their powers, less experienced in passing behind human walls, finding what there was there and using it, not asking of a man what he could not give, not forcing on him what he could not receive. Who can estimate what it was to the nation to have as a leader through the Civil War a man “born with a pass-key to hearts.” IDA M. TARBELL. CONTENTS PAGE He Knew Lincoln 3 Back in ’58 43 Father Abraham 87 In Lincoln’s Chair 127 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _Facing page_ “_Come and set by the stove by the hour and tell stories and talk and argue_” 4 “_Horace Greeley, he came in here to buy quinine_” 16 “_Aunt Sally, you couldn’t a done nuthin’ which would have pleased me better_” 18 “_He just talked to us that time out of his heart_” 24 “_You’re actin’ like a lot of cowards. You’ve helped make this war, and you’ve got to help fight it_” 26 “_We went out on the back stoop and sat down and talked and talked_” 30 HE KNEW LINCOLN “He has the pass-key to hearts, to him the response of the prying of hands on the knobs.” --_Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Answerer.”_